An Art Fair for the 99 Percent

A lot of things have changed on Governors Island since 2008, when work began to turn the rundown former Coast Guard base into a grand park in New York Harbor. Ferry service now runs seven days a week during the season. You can drink the water. And acres of open space have been built where drab military housing once stood.

One thing that hasn’t disappeared: The Governors Island Art Fair, now in its 10th year, opens on Saturday and runs every weekend through Oct. 1. The fair is larger now, and it has moved among several different buildings. But its homegrown ethos is intact, and admission is still free. (A round-trip ferry may cost you $2, though.) Organized by 4heads, a nonprofit arts organization, this year’s fair includes about 100 artists, who will fill the former officers’ houses known as Colonels’ Row as well as Liggett Hall, designed by McKim, Mead & White as an Army barracks.

Coming right after the August doldrums, when it seems much of the New York art world is away on vacation, the fair offers a lot of work by artists who are not part of the usual gallery parade. The atmosphere is more or less the opposite of the big commercial art fairs: welcoming and intimate.

Here is a sampling of work from this year’s fair.

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Marie Koo’s “Mr. Turing, You Are a Darling.”CreditCourtesy of the artist

A ‘Slightly Haunted’ Circus Tent

Primarily an oil painter, Marie Koo uses high-resolution still images of her work to create delirious animations, which she will be displaying along with prints of her paintings in a room she described as a “dilapidated, slightly haunted, abandoned circus tent.” Born in Hong Kong, she now lives and works in Queens, and succinctly describes her artistic philosophy: “Gaze into the abyss and giggle.”

Ms. Koo said that the Governors Island fair offers a chance to engage more deeply with other artists, as opposed to the party atmosphere of a gallery opening. The fair also brings visitors who aren’t steeped in the language of artist statements.

“As an artist I always think of myself as a performer,” she said, “just putting myself up there to see if the rotten vegetables come.”

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Dáreece Walker’s “Protest, Stand, Fight.”CreditCourtesy of the artist

The Giant in the Room

A key conceit in Dáreece Walker’s series of paintings, “Black Is the Giant,” is that the experience of repression builds and builds, a recurrent pileup of anxieties and fears that manifests itself in the oversize self-portraits he creates.

The first piece visitors to his installation will encounter, “Protest, Stand, Fight,” is nine feet tall, filling an entire wall. Mr. Walker, who is from Colorado but now works in Brooklyn, said that the giant version of himself within it is a reaction to the wearying repetitive patterns of racism. As an example, he cited the 2014 police killing of Tamir E. Rice, a 12-year-old black boy in Cleveland. Mr. Walker had already completed a work inspired by a similar incident, the 1994 killing of 13-year-old Nicholas Heyward Jr., who was holding a toy gun when he was shot by a police officer in Brooklyn.

“These things just repeat themselves,” he said.

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Susan Camp’s “Dyad (the other side).”CreditCourtesy of the artist

Two Heads, Inedible and Indelible

Susan Camp has been working with gourds for 15 years, an offshoot of her efforts to grow her own food at her home in Winterport, Me. She shapes them in molds. The results can be displayed inside their containers, or combined to sinister effect, as in “Dyad (the other side).”

“It’s sort of a collaboration that I have with the gourds,” she said, “but I’m very interested in how far they can exert their own characteristics.

Her work touches directly on how humans modify the natural world, she said. And using gourds has its practical side. Because they can be dried, they last a long time. Additionally, she added, “they’re all biodegradable, so my kids are not stuck with a barn full of artwork.”

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Trevor King’s installation “The Well.”CreditCourtesy of the artist

Surface Tension

For his installation in Liggett Hall, Trevor King drew from his upbringing in western Pennsylvania, where his father worked in a steel mill.

Mr. King carried in some 500 pounds of clay slip, sand and other materials, filling a wide room with a sludgy mixture that will be blasted with heat lamps over the duration of the fair, drying and cracking in an unpredictable pattern. A row of water jugs evokes the nearby bay, which all visitors will cross by boat.

“The art world sometimes can be a little bit of an island,” he said, adding that “I’m always looking for a chance to break that down a little bit.”

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Heloisa Escudero in her performance “Joy Count.”CreditBrian P. English

What’s Your Number?

Heloisa Escudero won’t have a permanent location for the fair. For her performance piece, “Joy Count,” running only on the fair’s final weekend, she will don a custom bodysuit and arm herself with a hand-held tally counter. When visitors approach, she will ask them to count the joys in their lives, from the smaller moments (“a morning cup of coffee with the sun in your face”) to bigger milestones like the birth of children.

Ms. Escudero, born in Brazil and now working in Arlington, Va., said that in a previous performance of the work, she received widely varying responses. Some participants went into the hundreds, she said, while others stopped at two. “I was like, ‘Are you done?’”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C17 of the New York edition with the headline: Far From the Gallery Parade, an Intimate Art Fair for the 99 Percent. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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